Election Day Coverage

Hank Willis

Who doesn't love an election day?! Giving your name and address at your local polling place, last minute attempts to figure out which Board of Education Supervisors to vote for, listening to the pundits duke it out as the poll returns come in. Well, if we are to look at statistics—and I'm not saying that we are—then that'd be about half of you out there. Even if I hadn't paid that much attention to the state-wide elections and municipal measures in a non-presidential election such as this one (and again I'm not saying or not saying that is the case here) I still get caught up in the fervor once the actual voting day arrives. I'll be the first to admit

Today was the first day for me voting in my new hometown, or the island as we islanders like to refer to it. A new polling place, new mayoral canditates—none of which rang a bell—and new voting machines, ones that, ironically, seemed quaintly pastoral as if from a time gone by. My friendly poll worker told me there were no hard drives, no hanging chads, no blurry touch screens and none of those pesky Diebold Voting Machines any Rubrics Cuber could hack in about five seconds. Just pencil and ink this time around. Standing alone at my voting booth, I almost felt a pang of nostalgia for those earlier Rube Goldbergian contraptions that took up so much space. There was nothing but myself, my cheat sheet and a couple of pieces of paper on which I was supposed to fill in the arrows and mark my picks for the best candidates.

I have to admit, my new polling place did not quite stir the emotions like my last one. Maybe it was the fact it was not in the basement of an old Baptist Church. Maybe it was the fact that I used to live in a much poorer neighborhood—OK friends, between you and I, we can call it ghetto—where people seemed to remember what it was like to be disenfranchised. Or maybe it was the fact that I voted amongst gas station attendants on their way to work, security guards on their way home from work, and that the polling volunteers were all elderly black women—the chuch-going kind—who worked at a snail's pace. But today, there were none of the tears in my eyes, the swelling up of civic pride, I used to experience on voting day. At a last ditch effort, I called a friend to see if he wanted to watch the poll returns in some working class bar. But alas, all I got was the machine.

I don't care who you vote for—OK, again this may not be factually accurate—but, yes, I think you should vote. It builds character. It generally makes you feel better about yourself much like how you feel after going to the gym. It makes you feel a part of somethig bigger. Is that so bad? Besides what have you got to lose? This is one test that you will never fail.

Hank Willis Priceless